The Bird Cage

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Not so long ago, as happens, I was in a Facebook debate
about something I neither knew much nor cared much about. I won’t say with whom
because I don’t want to mischaracterize his position. I don’t even remember
what side he was on. But he certainly knows about music, which can often be a
problem.

The debate—which involved a number of middle-aged
know-it-alls, not just myself—was about the relative merits and ups and downs
over the career span of Fleetwood Mac.

People—dudes, mostly—who know about music know well the
Correct Fleetwood Mac Position (CFMP). According to CFMP, the band’s best
period was in the 1960s, when they were a British blues band. When they met up
with Californians Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks and became enormously
popular, so goes CFMP, it all went downhill.

All-knowing music dudes (AKMDs) will tell you it was because
of the influence of then-couple Buckingham and Nicks, but I would suggest that the
AKMD perspective is tainted by the “enormously popular” part of the equation. AKMD’s
are all too often incapable of admitting, for example, that Miley Cyrus has a
fantastic singing voice or that Justin Timberlake has some tight jams. Some AKMD’s
can’t even bring themselves to enjoy The Beatles or Prince, although they’ll
say they recognize what’s good about it, because they simply cannot like music
with broad popular appeal.

Fleetwood Mac started as a good—sometimes great—band in the
mold of a bunch of other British blues bands in the 1960s and, in the 1970s, transformed
into a band making music not quite like anything anyone had made before and
playing it with remarkable musicianship. And remarkable musicianship and
innovative music are what AKMD’s ordinarily flock toward. Unless it’s
enormously popular, that is.

This wasn’t exactly what the Fleetwood Mac Facebook fight
(FMFF) was about, but it is what I was thinking about at the time. And in that
fight, I found myself defending not only the their 1977 album Rumours (which is
just plainly obvious) but also the follow-up, 1979’s Tusk. It was only upon
further reflection that I realized I don’t really know Tusk. I mean, I think I
do, but I asked myself when was the last time I heard it. I’ve never owned a
copy. I think I heard it, or at least some of it, from my cousin Chloe when it came
out. I think I read a review that said it was their "White Album" and that must
have impressed me terribly as a youth hungry for conventional wisdom. [Rolling
Stone’s review, it turns out, read “Like The White Album, Tusk is less a
collection of finished songs than a mosaic of pop-rock fragments by individual
performers."] I remember looking at the record cover at the store and
wanting it, but it was a double album! $15.98 was a serious investment at the
time—and then the time was gone.

I asked in the wake of that FFMF myself what songs I could
name off of the album. Not even call to memory, just name. Well, there’s the
title track, of course, which I will always love, but the only other song I
could come up with was “Sara,” and once I realized I was singing Hall and
Oates’ “Sara Smile” in my head I couldn’t come up with the Fleetwood Mac
melody. On an album with 20 songs, an album I was defending as great, I could
remember exactly one. That’s five percent. That’s a nickel. That’s nothing. Apparently,
I just like the idea of defending Tusk.

So, on Thanksgiving night, 2017, with the apartment to myself, I
sat down to listen to Tusk, discs one through three of the 2015 remastered
“Deluxe Edition” reissue, on Spotify: the entire set of songs thrice over in
original and alternate takes, demos and remixes. (The last two discs in the set
are recordings from the 1979-80 tour and contain material from other albums so
they were excluded from this listening session.)

The first thing I discovered was that the song “Tusk” does
not kick off the album, as it did in my memory. No, it’s the second to last
song on the fourth side. At the same moment I discovered “Again and Again” is
actually the lead-off song, a huge and enjoyable hit. The second thing I
discovered is that, well, it all sounds like Fleetwood Mac. It was all
familiar, pleasant, likeable, and certainly Christine McVie’s “Again and Again”
and “Think About Me” and Nicks’ “Sara” (oh, right, that’s how it goes) were
happy memories, but song after song passed me by like a gentle stream. That is,
until a pair of Buckingham songs in the middle of what would have been side
two.

Fleetwood Mac was a remarkably talented outfit. The rhythm
section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie pounds without letting you know
they’re pounding. Christine McVie brings a welcome maturity (not in age but in
wisdom) to the songwriting while Nicks is the obvious allure but let’s face it,
her presence necessitates McVie as a ballast. A band with Nicks as the only
woman would be pretty hard to take, almost as bad as Jefferson/Jefferson
Airplane/Starship/Starship. But Lindsey Buckingham, with his electric
finger-picking and his under-control fury, is what puts the band above and
beyond such cocaine-fueled yacht-rock compadres as Ambrosia, America, Orleans
and the Eagles.

The one-two Buckingham punch of “That’s All for Everyone”
and “Not That Funny” was the first time I felt glad to be listening to the
record, for what I now felt like was maybe the first time. The songs aren’t up
there with his contributions to Rumours (“The
Chain,” “Go Your Own Way”), but they’re intelligent, enjoyable pop. Side two
ends with “Sisters of the Moon,” a great Nicks song. Or is it just great
because it’s on the heels of the Buckingham double shot? No, it’s great and it’s
on the heels of a Buckingham double shot. Fleetwood Mac is all about chemistry
and pop albums—at least back when they were sold on physical media—are all
about sequencing.

Nicks holds fast, kicking off side three with “Angel,” a
song that seems to be about losing an angel but that she sings with such
defiance you know she’ll find another. Then there’s a toss-away, two-minute
Buckingham country stomp and then a pair of McVie songs. Why is it so hard to
love McVie’s songs? Was the band toying with us by setting up the gypsy and the
matron, so that when we get the latter we are left wanting the former? Unfair,
I know, and I almost always like her songs whereas I can hate a Stevie Nicks
song. Even “Don’t Stop,” her biggest song and likely the band’s best-known song,
doesn’t hook in a way that can’t be unhooked. I was intrigued by the
Buckingham/McVie record that came out last year. I excitedly listened to it
once (via, I believe, an NPR stream), extolled its virtues on social media and
never listened again. So, yeah, a pair of McVie songs. I’m sorry, Christine.
I’d like to like you more than I do. And then a forgettable Buckingham song.
They happen. More than occasionally. And from there the album kind of goes limp
again. Until the second to last song. Ahhhhh… the second to last song.

The album’s titular and penultimate track opens with an
indifferent crowd vacillating, wavering. It’s mysterious—are we at a concert? a
party? a train station?—but we can’t focus long enough to consider the question
because our thoughts are flattened by pounding drums. “Tusk” (the song) picks
up from the reprise of the Beatles “Strawberry Field Forever” and gave us Gwen
Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” (another song that AKMD could never admit is good)
and then it’s gone. Three minutes, thirty-eight seconds, right in the ballpark
for a pop song, but no matter how many times you hear it, you can’t get to it.
It’s as impactful as it is ethereal. It was an unlikely hit single (#8 in the
U.S., #6 in the U.K.) in a particularly unstable year for popular music.

Leaving it there wouldn’t have worked. Nothing on the album
anticipates it, there’s no real right place to put it, but putting it last
would have been selling us a beat bag. McVie’s “Never Forget” cradles us in its
arms in the way she’s so good at. It’s just a pop album, she says, we’re just a
pop band. Don’t worry about who’s hurting whom (she would, of course, know the
proper usage of who and whom). We’ll all be fine, yourself included.

The deluxe edition reissue doesn’t add much more than
minutes to the album. There’s multiple versions of “Tusk” as well as
Buckingham’s “I Know I’m Not Wrong,” and we get the unreleased
slightly-punkish-in-a-Richard-Thompson-sort-of-way Buckingham tune “Out On the
Road.” But more is rarely better and it isn’t here.

Rumours sold 10 million copies in the year after its
release. Tusk sold 4 million in its first year. It was reportedly the all-time
biggest sales decrease from one album to the next. But sales figures are
unimportant. The question is, do I still want to defend Tusk now that I know
what I’m defending? Well, I will argue that listening to the 70s version of
Fleetwood Mac, listening closely, is a joy, even when the songs aren’t great.
Pick a song and pick an instrument to follow. I guarantee you’ll be surprised
at what you never noticed before. That doesn’t make it a masterpiece, but it
does make for a band that can sustain the years.

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Composer Ted Hearne and videographer Jonathan David Kane’s Miami in Movements couldn’t have
happened anywhere but at South Beach’s New World Center, for more than just the
site-specific reasons.

The work was presented in a revised form on February 3 (after
receiving its premiere the previous October) as a part of a concert in New World
Symphony’s New Work Series. Composed as a love letter to a city struggling in the
aftermath of Hurricane Irma, it’s a huge piece of work, employing multiple
screens and projectors and an orchestra of some 80 musicians. Witnessing the
production in the impressive New World Center theater was something of a double
immersion: a weekend in Miami Beach peaking with the remarkable performance.

Opening rather sweetly with swamps, birds and lizards moving
across the large, overhead screens, we were soon on the highway traveling in to
the city. Within minutes, we were meeting Miamians and hearing them tell their
tales, their prerecorded voices threaded into the live music. The score was
conceived to complement, not overwhelm, and it seemed as if there was so much
information already being presented that Hearne didn’t need to resort to the
sensory overload he often favors. What he wrote was effective, evocative
soundtrack music, themes befitting the beauty and the bustle of a diverse and
growing city.

Like the film, the orchestra was physically fragmented, with
at one point a brass band appearing above the audience on the highest of the
four smaller stages that ring the room. They built an unexpected cacophony
along with the orchestra: layered, orchestral loops and slapped evoking the
electo patterning of dance music while on screen people danced—ballet, jazz,
hip hop, Latin, even fire dance. At these moments, when the music was about
music, it became the most effective.

Neither, the movies nor the music of Miami in Movements would stand alone, nor were they meant to. What
Hearne and Kane have crafted is interdisciplinary and interdependent, a time
capsule of the growing metropolis that likes to call itself “the magic city.”

Miami in Movements occupied
the final portion of the February 3 program, which was divided into three
sections with an interval between each, allowing for reconfigurations of the
flexible stage in the multi-faceted, 756-seat theater. The first part of the
program was given over to sections of NWS co-founder, artistic director conductor
Michael Tilson Thomas’s Glimpses of the
Big Picture, an in-progress musical memoir. With three grand pianos and an
electric bass guitar, the orchestra bore plenty of muscle, although most of the
music was fairly restrained behind Tilson Thomas’s reading of his own anecdotal
texts. A melancholy solo piano, often with left and right hands in isolation,
supported the first section, the pianist shot dramatically from above and
projected behind the stage while Tilson Thomas recited from a podium.
Light and enjoyable music, reminiscent of a Leonard Bernstein score, supported
the narrator’s move to New York City in the late 1970s, a surreal dream about
an auction house and adventures in dog walking. The middle section of the
program featured a rather beleaguered one-act play about a recluse and the
imaginary musicians who provided his life soundtrack.

The Cultural Tourist soon learns that Miami Beach is a
separate municipality from Miami, but also that in local parlance, all 1,898
square miles of Dade County count as Miami. The city is a growing metropolis,
in recent years building an international reputation as a hub for Latin and
Caribbean art, attracting Chinese and Russian investment. It’s a place where no
one is indigenous —as native Miamian Jonathan David Kane pointed out in a press
meeting—built on a swamp and populated by numerous transient cultures.

It’s also easy, at least for the Northeastern breed of the
Cultural Tourist, to assume that Miami is all beach volleyball and neon-colored
drinks. But it’s the host city of the influential Art Basel America, a major
event on the national arts calendar. The city’s Nu Deco Ensemble is a chamber
orchestra dedicated to 20th and 21st century works.
Together, Miami and Miami Beach boast beautiful examples of Deco and modern
architecture, impressive museums. Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the
Performing Arts also receives accolades for its design, but the New World
Center across Biscayne Bay is no less impressive.

Within the center’s Frank Gehry—designed walls, the students
who comprise the New World Symphony orchestra and center work in three-year
fellowships, specializing in performance, conducting archiving and
engineering.Beyond the opportunity to
prepare and perform works like Miami in
Movements, the performance fellows get experience in community engagement,
audition preparation, speaking onstage and on-camera and entrepreneurship (as
well as receiving housing and a livable stipend). The faculty is comprised
entirely of visiting professionals, including business instructors from the Kellogg
School of Management.

The center is also committed to community engagement and education,
with concerts projected in real time on an outside wall. The “Wallcast” system,
with 20 outdoor speakers and seating for up to 2,000, is also used for
commissioned video murals and popular movies. It’s exciting to visit such a
vibrant space, from all appearances committed not just to its programming but
to building orchestras and audiences for the future.

Thursday, August 31, 2017

I had the opportunity to speak with Amir ElSaffar for the September issue of The New York City Jazz Record. Thank you to NYCJR for letting me post the unedited transcript here. You can listen to a track from the Not Two by his Rivers of Sound ensemble, or buy the whole album, here.

Trumpeter, santur player, vocalist and composer Amir
ElSaffar has made more than one mark on contemporary jazz. Borrowing from his
background and studies of Arabic music (his father is originally from Iraq),
ElSaffar has developed his own techniques for playing quarter tones on the
trumpet. Extending that cross-pollination, he has released a series of
beautiful and evocative records combining Arabic and Western approaches and
instrumentation. I spoke with him as he was concluding a composer residency
in France and gearing up to present his large ensemble Rivers of Sound at the
Newport Jazz Festival.

Kurt Gottschalk: First off, tell us what you’re doing in France.

Amir ElSaffar: I’m composing for an ensemble called Ictus, a
contemporary music ensemble based in Brussels. They’re really fantastic,
renowned in Europe in contemporary music circles. I’m writing a piece using the
maqam [Iraqi devotional song] language and some of the microtonal stuff I’ve
been discovering. We have a retuned piano, a retuned vibraphone, but it’s
further out, it’s not like the usual maqam tuning. We’ve gone several steps
beyond. There’s four string players and two woodwinds, it’s an octet plus me.
We just had a week of rehearsals and it was pretty intense, it was not easy,
because I’m trying to give them stuff by ear and trying to work out ideas in
the rehearsal process and they’re used to having complete scores. They’re
excited by the idea but they’re also just a bit timid or something, so it was a
challenge. I’m just realizing I have to score out a lot more than what I like
to do and what I’m used to so I’m just going to be buried in this work for the
next month.

KG: The new record is just beautiful, I love it, and the
release concert that you did at the River to River festival was just great.

AE: Thank you, yeah, the music keeps getting better every
time we play it.

KG: How many times have you played it?

AE: We premiered it April 15, I think eight total. Newport
will be our ninth.

KG: It was hard at the release concert to ignore geographically
where we were, right in the financial district and just a few blocks from
Ground Zero. I don’t want to project meaning onto it but certainly sitting in
the audience it felt very significant.

AE: Oh yeah? That’s interesting. I guess I’m used to it
because Alwan [for the Arts, where ElSaffar is music curator] is down in that
neighborhood so I’m in that neighborhood all the time and we have concerts
there a few times a month. I didn’t think about it, actually. Although maybe
being in this Chase Plaza and all that, it’s a very corporate part of town. I’m
constantly aware of that contradiction, I guess, in working and presenting art
and music in that neighborhood.

KG: Being outdoors made it a little more profound, seeing
the buildings towering over us rather than being inside a theater.

AE: Right, sort of nestled in the midst of these large,
glass structures that keep sprouting everywhere in the city.

KG: You used the word “contradiction,” you said you’re
aware of the contradiction. I wonder if I could ask you, in your view, what is
the contradiction there?

AE: There’s not an art scene, there aren’t art galleries or
performance spaces so much in that neighborhood. It’s mostly the banking world
and Wall Street, so presenting music and presenting something that’s bringing a
very different imagery, that’s the contradiction.

KG: Have you ever felt a response of political tension to
the work you’re doing, combining these two musical traditions?

AE: Perhaps it’s there but to me, I’m at a point where I
don’t see them as being separate. For me it’s about the conversation between
sounds and between personalities and individuals and having this idea of how we
can create something beautiful. I don’t see eastern and western or U.S. and
Arab and Islamic culture, those at this point are so far from the way I’m
seeing and hearing the music. It’s really a question of how can we make these
frequencies work together, teaching people who have never played E-half-flat
and then when they do play it, and when they really feel it, then they connect
to something deep and it’s not just external but it’s something that resonates
very deeply within the individual. And similarly when we get into a rhythmic
pattern or the energy of collective group improvisation or something that’s
more akin to what’s found in jazz of the last 50 or 60 years, that also somehow
there’s an energy, the oud players will get excited and get engaged. I’m really
thinking more about these energies and the interaction of vibration, whether it’s
sonic or rhythmic, or personalities, and that conversation’s being had. So if
anything it’s being able to present that in the midst of where people are in
this very heightened state of anxiety. I think that music and art have a very
particular place right now to somehow, not really wash over, interpenetrate and
allow things to release a little bit. It’s almost like being able to encompass
all of what’s going on, the ups and the downs and the extremes and the highs
and the lows, it’s almost like a compassionate embrace that I think sound can
create physically. With this project in particular, when we play, I feel like
that’s what we’re creating. That afternoon at River to River, I felt this
special moment that we shared, where people were really in that space. It’s not
to deny or to pretend that problems don’t exist but it’s actually to be
resilient and to persist regardless of what’s happening in other aspects of our
lives.

KG: The new record is on New Amsterdam, a new label for
you. Do you see that helping you reach a new audience?

AE: Yeah. New Amsterdam is really well known in contemporary
classical music circles and I think jazz is an important element, but the ideal
venues are concert halls. When we play at the Kimmel Center or Kreeger Museum
of Art or the Walker, those type of venues seem to really hold this music well.
The Newport Jazz Festival will be our first jazz festival gig and I’m curious
to see how the music fits in that space. The responses I’m getting are already
starting to indicate a shift toward that demographic.

KG: How did you end up connected with New Amsterdam?

AS: It was actually through Darcy James Argue, who’s a
friend I’ve worked with several times and we’ve hung out over the years. He
made the connection and knowing the fresh attitude and approach they have
toward music and the wide genre-defying artists that they have, I felt that
that was kind of an ideal fit for what I’m doing right now.

KG: It’s a big group. How did you decide on the
instrumentation for the ensemble?

AE: The Two Rivers Ensemble, which is the sextet that’s been
active since 2006, combines jazz instrumentation with Eastern instrumentation.
So the idea of Rivers of Sound was to expand that to a wider canvas. I chose
instruments that resonate in certain ways with each other, picking out possible
sonorities that can complement each other, for instance vibraphone, santur and
the cymbals of the drum, they all have this metallic tingy sound and they
resonate with each other in a very particular way even though they’re coming
from different traditions. There’s a sort of shared history and the sounds are
sympathetic to one another. But a major part of the choice of instrumentation
was actually the individuals. I chose people who I believe can really listen to
one another. Each person has a very particular, unique sound that I resonated
with and their personalities I gel with and they’re people that I consider to
be friends. They’re all musicians I’ve worked with, some for more than 20 years
in different contexts. Everybody that I wanted in this band was available. They
were all my first pick, which is kind of amazing. And each person in the group
represents a different era or a different ensemble or a different place in my
life. Like Jason Adasiewicz and I played together in high school and college.
JD Parran and I played together in Cecil Taylor’s large ensembles. Mohammed
Saleh, the oboe and English horn player, and I were working with Daniel
Barenboim in his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999. And then of course
my sister, who kind of introduced me to Arabic music more than 20 years ago. So
with each person, there’s a resonance there.

KG: It’s great it worked out the way it did. You can
really feel the connection between the players.

AE: Yeah, friendships formed within the ensemble as well.
People became very tight quickly. Maybe it was the intensity of our first week
together where we had very long rehearsals and an all day soundcheck and gig at
Lincoln Center and then a 14-hour recording session. That kind of experience
can fuse people together. There’s this really nice sense of cameraderie
throughout the group. It feels like everyone cares about the rest of the
ensemble. It’s a really nice vibe.

KG: It seems silly to ask after your last response but I
wanted to ask you if you see this as an ongoing project.

AE: Absolutely. I actually am now finding a way to compose a
new piece for the group. The first goal was imagining and in the process of
rehearsal trying things and finding out how this instrumentation could work
together. Now that the sound has become clear, there’s all kinds of new ideas
and I think there’s a lot more potential for this group. Wheels are turning.
And regardless the group is going to continue to tour. We have dates through
2018.

KG: What do you hope that Alwan brings to the cultural
life in New York?

AS When Alwan started it was really Arabs and Iranians and
people from Turkey, people from South Asia. There were artists from all
disciplines coming together as well as university students and professors, so
it was creating this environment for conversations among artists and
intellectuals, primarily from this region or connected to the region in one way
or another. Now it’s much more open to the larger cultural scene in New York. Our
audiences are now 50% people from the Arab world and 50% from anywhere else. So
somehow we are representing this part of the world and not only representing
traditions but actually showing innovations and how societies that are
generally thought of as being ancient or connected to some longstanding
tradition, that there’s actually innovation and there is a contemporary art
scene and contemporary culture and things happening right now that are breaking
now.

KG: Last question: Define the word river.

AE: The idea of two rivers was of course a reference to the
Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, but it was also about joining the streams of jazz
and Iraqi music when I first started this project in 2006. But I started to
think about it as bloodlines and my own blood and being part Iraqi and part
American. There was this idea of currents and traditions in the beginning, this
continuity that a river could represent. Now it’s gone beyond that. The idea of
rivers of sound was really about, I keep coming back to it, but resonance, and
each river almost being frequency or being a sonority or being a timbre or
being a particular vibration and then how these rivers, how these sounds,
coalesce and how they influence each other when joined. I started to pay a lot
of attention to different bodies of water, but in particular rivers, because of
the way that the currents run. I used to live right on the Hudson River and I’d
watch all the different layers of currents, one on the top going very quickly
in one direction and then ripples going in the opposite direction just below
and then another layer below that that was maybe going at a 30 degree angle and
another speed and then watching how the light reflects off the surface of the
water. This kind of visual cue became part of my composition, too. So with
Rivers of Sound I was really trying to create the sense of multiple currents
and multiple streams happening in layers above one other. So in pieces like
“Jourjina Over 3” and “Hijaz 21/8,” there’s three or four different pulses
happening simultaneously that create a sense of moving in opposing directions.
That was an image inspired by rivers. Rivers of Sound I also think of as
rivers of light and this idea of the overtones of a sound eventually reaching
light. I don’t know if it’s physically possible but it’s an ideal that I’m
constantly striving for in the music.

Monday, May 22, 2017

Anne Hilde Neset, the artistic director of the 5-year-old
Only Connect Festival in Oslo, Norway, introduced Paal Nilssen-Love’s Extra
Large Unit by saying that for years she’d been trying to get the drummer to
“write more stuff down. For the final set of her final year with the festival,
she got her wish. Nilssen-Love supplemented his 12-piece Large Unit with 20
students from the Norwegian Academy of Music to present a 30-minute suite of
groove, humor and historical referencing.

The players were spread across the floor of the Marmorsalen
theater in the Sentralen – a posh, newly opened arts center in an old bank
building near the city center – with scattered audience seating just beyond
them, so that that players and spectators were very nearly sitting
together.

The piece, “more fun please,” seemed an endless
succession of cues and causation. It started after an extended silence with a
trombone blast and a piano smash and then a quick scattering of isolated events
until a vague arabesque emitted from a standing violinist. The blasts continued
including from electronicistTommi Keränen, Nilssen-Love’s secret weapon
in the group. The violin dance seemed to soothe the beast – first one of the
three pianos joined in and in short order everyone had followed into a quiet
rumble.

There then followed a remarkable meditation for flute and
two accordions (one in drone, the other seeming to pop reeds, if that’s possible)
before Nilssen-Love began cuing unison blasts, which seemed to kickstart a
vibraphone, playing something quicker but rather in keeping with the flute
song. One of the student pianists started playing in opposition to the vibes
but quIckly 180’d, then two drummers and four bassists pushing into free jazz
territory. A cadre of horns stormed in and the Very Large Unit began to
resemble (in sound, not size) the Cecil Taylor Unit that preceded it.

Before one could ask the stale question about composition vs
improvisation, they headed into a bit of circus music. Was Nilssen-Love teasing
the question? Was he intentionally messing with the idea of composition in jazz
by moving from a Taylor mode through a moment of Nino Rota and headlong into a
Mingus-inspired subsection? Was he raising the hackneyed notion of live
improvisation vs sterile documentation by having electronics and trumpet
players cue separate halves of the band with vinyl records onto which written
cues were taped: PAC-MAN; TEQUILA; BEAUTY; VOFF!; 8, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; an arrow
pointing upward, a cartoon of a ghost, or FUCK TRUMP (the last one being
promptly smashed)?

There was, in any event, a score on a stand in front of each
of the musicians, with pages combining traditional and graphic notation, and
the players certainly referred to them at least some of the time, and do so
there was something actually written down on paper. And from the faces of the
students and Unit members after the piece concluded, there was fun to be had,
and no doubt a wish for more.

Sunday, May 7, 2017

Producer Hal Willner was a pilgrim in the field of the
tribute album. His star-studded and slightly left of center dedications to
Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill and Disney movie soundtracks set the bar for
curated compilation discs. But now and again, an effort of his has fallen
through the cracks.

One such overlooked project is the 2012 record The
Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, a sort of radio play
based on an early Hunter S. Thompson article with actor Tim Robbins in the role
of the drug-addled protagonist and music by Bill Frisell.

The record isn’t exactly lost treasure; as a narrative piece
it doesn’t necessarily invite repeat listens like his albums built around
musical bodies of work. But with a protagonists-narrator occupying the bulk of
the spoken parts, it isn’t exactly a radio play, either.

The musico-gonzo journo fable found life onstage, however,
on the night before the actual Derby in a production directed by
Chloe Webb with Robbins returning get in the lead role and Willner, Frisell
and band all onstage for the action.

After a screening of a Sherman and Mr. Peabody cartoon
(from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show) about the first
Kentucky Derby and a newsreel about Seabiscuit, the players entered
then, oddly enough, to Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” over the sound
system.

The sprightly sextet of horns was pushed by drummer Gerald
Cleaver through the overture, featuring each of the instrumentalists in quick
succession. They then evoked the recognizable strains of “My Old Kentucky
Home,” to which Robbins took the stage, towering over everything around him.
Intoning Hunter S. Thompson quite admirably, he delivered Thompson’s essay with
Willner, Webb and actor Brad Hall voicing incidental characters, the latter
also fulfilling the role of illustrator/enabler Ralph Steadman.

“We didn’t give a damn about the horses on the track,”
Robbins bellowed, Steadman’s illustrations for the original 1970 Scanlon’s
Monthly story projected behind him. “We had come there to watch the real
beasts perform.” The tone was set for their descent into the
drunken derby, looking down their own drug-filled noses. Robbins stood
easily against the other Thompson portrayers, Johnny Depp and Bill Murray,
acing that insistent voice, like David Brinkley on the verge of a
coronary.

The action was compelling even if not altogether acted out,
while Frisell’s music was a bit too full to call “incidental.” His themes were
so familiar that even without his trademark guitar tone, the music (albeit
played by longtime associates) was imminently recognizable as his. It was very
present but not so much as to get in the way and all of the actors – Robbins
certainly but even Wilner – gave powerful enough deliveries that they could
rise above the jaunty soundtrack. At times, Doug WIeselman’s bass clarinet
(revising the main theme without accompaniment at Steadman and Thompson’s first
meeting, for example) pulled the scenes together where they might have lacked
without stage set or costume.

An instrumental section gave the band a chance to fly a little higher while
Webb, in a grotesque pantomime horse head, traipsed down the center aisle and
did a quick dance with Robbins. She returned in horsehead at the end, as
Thompson (himself a Louisville native) dismissed his artist associate, seeming
in his stupor to choose the derby-goers over the man who would become his
closest working associate. “We can do without your kind in Kentucky,” he
hollered, and then had a dance with the horse as if he were at last freed of
the assignment.

When Frisell and WIlner’s record of the production first came out, it fell a bit flat, an interesting novelty but far from either
of their strongest work. On Derby Eve at Town Hall, however, it was a
winner.